Entropic Journal

Solidarity

2011-08-10T11:55:00.001-07:00

If the consumer has not the will to make common cause with the worker – specifically, the willingness to spend more in acquiring less when such transactions are necessary to ensure that workers are able to earn sufficient wages to feed and shelter their families – then no other force on Earth can protect labor. A poverty of self-governance is no foundation for a popularly-elected government to build the onerous restrictions on business and trade that would be needed.

Is there any other delusion so cruel as imagining that reform of democracy – or worse, revolution – could compensate for a so basic a failure of brotherhood? Perhaps yes: the belief that free markets among selfish men might yield a condition of virtue.

Treading Lightly

2011-08-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

The quest for “sustainability” is a continuing challenge we pose to ourselves: “What shall I do – what shall WE do – to welcome those who would tread lightly on Earth into our community?”

Thus we would ask, “What do those who tread lightly need from me and my neighbors?”

First we should recognize that “treading lightly” is not merely a figure of speech – it has everything to do with how much stuff, how much land, and how much energy one demands. Indeed, “treading” is all about motion: mass, speed, size, momentum, displacement, kinetic energy. The more one takes, the faster one goes, the further one travels, the heaver the treading. There may be no better indicator of our footprint on Earth than the odometer reading in our car multiplied by the aggressiveness of our driving.

Offhand we might think those who demand little in the way of stuff, land, and energy would need little else from their neighbors, but this is not so. Why? Treading lightly is by nature a fragile undertaking – one which cannot take root and thrive where the swift, the powerful, and the heavily armored dominate the landscape. It is no overstatement to say that “Light Treaders” are an endangered species in this nation, and that we-the-people continue to degrade and destroy suitable habitat for them. If you are wondering whether this pertains to zoning codes, sprawl, self-segregation, and automobile dependence, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!”

I will end with a specific challenge. Children – left to their own devices – are some of the Lightest Treaders still extant. What, my friend, are you doing where you live to make it safe, practical, and pleasant for children to walk to school, ride their bicycle to soccer practice, run over to their friend’s house to play?

I would suggest there is nothing they need more from us than our feet…on the ground…with them.

Am I my Brother's Keeper?

2011-07-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

I would say that two worldviews currently dominate our public discourse about political economics in these United States. One holds it is the responsibility of Government to ensure that people have jobs and that their basic needs are met. The other holds that an unfettered Free Market will provide sufficient employment (and other means of livelihood), thereby ensuring that people can take care of their own needs.

As divergent as they might first appear, they have much in common. Both assign responsibility to abstractions. Both relegate human behavior to the realm of mechanics. Both trivialize (or worse, ignore) issues of scale in human relationships. One usually demands more taxes (albeit from someone else) while the other invariably demands fewer, but neither demands much else in the way of citizenship. The difference between “The Government is my brother’s keeper” and “The Market is my brother’s keeper” pales to insignificance when compared to “I am my brother’s keeper”. Our tendencies to outsource responsibility are staggering.

One might think the tremendous political turmoil which has seized us in Wisconsin would have shifted our public debate beyond these two worldviews, but thus far I see little evidence of it. The sustainability and Transition movements are still “fringe” – and perhaps for good reason, given how new and as-yet ill-defined they are. Most on the left, many in the center, and an astonishing number on the right instinctively reject traditional religious prescriptions for the public realm. One might be forgiven for concluding that Ayn Rand and Paul Krugman span the entirety of economic philosophy.

As for me, I find myself returning to the words of Edmund Burke, which I will paraphrase here:

“We are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to our disposition to put moral chains upon our own appetites…it is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Our passions forge our fetters.”

Leaving It In The Ground

2011-04-18T15:26:00.001-07:00

How is it possible we are not discussing how much fossil fuel we will LEAVE IN THE GROUND, just in case our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren need it for truly important purposes like growing food?

This is not merely a prudent form of insurance. Responsible stewardship – including a willingness to sacrifice present consumption – is a profoundly moral imperative. What kind of people would grab for all they can get from the Buffet Table of Life…and not give a second thought to leaving some for those who follow?

There are no guarantees that replacements for cheap and abundant fossil fuels will magically appear just because our heirs happen to need or want them. Hoping or expecting technology or market forces to “save” them is criminally irresponsible. If their inheritance from us is a continued structural addiction to oil – but not enough oil to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves – our generation will have perpetrated an unprecedented injustice.

A great deal of our current energy consumption in the United States is discretionary. We burn millions of barrels of petroleum to play, mow lawns, and blow leaves off our sidewalks. We drive and fly billions of miles for vacations. We demand uniform indoor temperatures year around. Perhaps as many as half of our high school juniors and seniors drive to school – even though school buses and transit are available. None of these are essential for civilized life.

And consider the lunacy of automobile-based access. Surely there is not enough energy on Earth for 7 billion people to drive everywhere in 2-3 ton motorized exoskeletons! Moreover, when most of us drive to most of our destinations, we make our communities unsafe, impractical, and unpleasant for non-motorists – which is to say, we force high levels of energy consumption on all who live in our midst.

What is needed? Increased efficiency is necessary but not sufficient. We need to CURTAIL our discretionary fuel-guzzling activities. Any comprehensive accounting will show the possibilities are vast. The more we curtail now, the more fossil energy we leave for a what may prove to be a difficult and lengthy transition.

Does our generation have the decency and determination to roll up our sleeves and get on with the job? Do we even have the backbone to make those who chant “Drill baby drill!” hang their heads in shame?

Alien Nation

2011-04-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

I believe the physical isolation and socio-economic segregation afforded by the automobile are integral to the cultural alienation and political bipolarization which afflict our times. There can be no meaningful discourse among us if we spend most of our lives withdrawn into suits of armor – metaphorical or actual.

For it is not merely the shells of automobiles which separate us – it is the lifestyles and community patterns we have built to accommodate them.

I think of the tremendous joy I felt mingling with the crowds on Madison’s Capitol Square during the last few months. Then I think of how terribly lonely I felt yesterday, standing with a campaign sign along Main Street in the village of Oregon as rush hour traffic surged by. Yes, some drivers honked their horns and flashed a thumbs-up – and more than a few cursed me and flipped me the bird – but there was precious little HUMAN connection in any of it. For these motorists I did not persist; like the torrent of images on a television screen I was a phenomenon that rapidly came up before them and just as quickly vanished in the rear-view mirror.

And yet one great irony struck me amidst this fleeting interaction: how many motorists seemed to resent my imposition on their solitude – as though I was standing in their backyard peeking through their windows. Is this our expectation – that motoring is a personal and anonymous act, and that public thoroughfares are extensions of our private property?

P.S. You may ask why I chose Main Street. Because it is the closest thing to a “public square” in my village.

Will-to-power

2011-01-19T08:32:00.000-08:00

(1) One pivotal question of our time is whether we shall commit ourselves to protecting variants of the human species whose technological will-to-power is modest from variants whose powers are great. The fact that we have chosen to idolize a Darwinian form of economics would suggest otherwise.

(2) The First World suburban Progressive with the “COEXIST” bumper sticker on his Prius may indulge fantasies of solidarity with the oppressed billions in the Third World, but the raw daily-average horsepower which undergirds his secure and comfortable way of life places him in an entirely different league. Empire is his father; Growth Capitalism is the hand that has woven the world-wide-web of extraction which daily brings hitherto-inconceivable material abundance to his quiet tree-lined neighborhood.

(3) It is much easier for those of us with secure income flows to contemplate these things. The insecure will naturally be more inclined to heed those who promise a quarter-million new jobs.

(4) If you do not grasp the ramifications of #1 in the abstract, try to exercise your right to ride a bicycle on one of Dane County’s “rural” arterial highways at rush hour.

Cheerio!

Cheerio!

Shovel-Ready versus Soldier-Ready

2011-01-12T09:25:00.000-08:00

There really isn’t any serious debate in Washington over Keynesianism. Or there won’t be when the Tea Party freshmen get over their delusions of independence. When money has done the talking for you, it expects you to do the talking for it.

Here is the “split”.

Some of them want to throw money at “shovel-ready” highway projects…and their good friends in the road-building, car-manufacturing, and fuel-pumping businesses.

The others want to throw money at “soldier-ready” military adventures…and all their defense-contractor pals.

Whether you drop money from helicopters or “forget” to include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget comes down to the same thing.

The handful of real peaceniks and budget hawks in Washington have no idea what they’d do with the staggering unemployment which would result from a 50% cut in defense spending. Somehow the prospects for renewed frenzy in McMansion-building, Escalade-manufacturing, and imported-TV-selling don’t seem all that plausible right now. As always there are a lot more jobs to be had in making stuff and then blowing it up.

What to do about it? Hmm…what would happen if we-the-people began to behave as though we valued dignified, fulfilling jobs for one-another over the lowest prices and the highest rates of return? What would happen if we stopped outsourcing so much responsibility?

To be continued…

Peace on Earth

2010-12-21T11:01:00.000-08:00

Human legs cannot compete in communities where the majority defines Access with gasoline and automobiles.

My people are at war with Slow Movement.
My people are at war with Proximity.
My people are at war with the Human Scale.

And my people are desperate to believe war begins somewhere other than with our Way of Life here and now.

In the spirit of Christmas, imagine that Peace on Earth begins with us…occupying far less of it.
In the renewal of the New Year, resolve to become that Peace.

Greed and Growth

2010-09-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

Greed alone does not explain the growth imperative. Given constantly-rising labor productivity (i.e. lower labor inputs per unit output), the only way to stave off rising unemployment is to constantly increase consumption. But does it make any sense to blame productivity? Should we castigate CNC lathes and imprison programmable logic controllers? That would make as much sense as flogging gasoline pumps for failing to display prices which are onerous enough to make “people” conserve. Talk about passing the buck!

No, the growth imperative is the inevitable result of a spiritual deficit: we-the-people do not behave like we want to need human labor. Our actions indicate we’d rather employ fossil fuels and motorized machines and computers than employ human sweat, human craftsmanship, and human cogitation. God help us, we don’t even want to employ our own legs to get from “a” to “b” anymore. Why? Because we can get more for less that way. In fact sometimes it seems like we’re all swept up in a rat-race to get something for nothing.

The crisis which grips us today is not (yet) one of insufficient energy and raw-material inputs for “healthy economic growth”. Nor is it (yet) one of insufficient output of material goods for people in “advanced” economies. Our waistlines and landscapes are stark reminders that we already have far more Doritos and Escalades and McMansions than we “need”.

The crisis is rooted in our failure to choose to need one-another. The crisis is rooted in our willingness to “outsource” responsibility for a fundamental human need: to be needed - to labor and create for a purpose beyond ourselves. The fact that most of us expect “government” and/or “the economy” to shoulder this duty – a duty of brotherhood – is proof of our insanity.

We are damned fools to expect corporations or bankers or the educational system or elected leaders (especially those at higher levels) to do anything about this. They are but symptoms which emerge from the disease.

Transportation Kinetics

2010-08-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

The laws of kinetic energy for a hot gas beautifully describe our default behaviors in the complex network of interconnected “pressure vessels” we call our transportation corridors. Small things that move slowly get whacked by big things that move fast. Either the meek learn to get the hell out of the way; or they get with the program, bulk up, and shift into high gear.

It’s really not much more complicated than that. Not unless significant numbers of “molecules” choose to behave as though they are responsible for the impacts of their momentum on other molecules. And if that happens – Whoa! The changes which occur could begin to seem…well, intentional. As though something like intelligence might be at work. We might even see some respect for the little guy. But more on that later.

First, why do so many molecules want to go somewhere else so often in the first place? Why aren’t they happy being where they already are? And why are so many of the places where they want to go located so far apart? Why isn’t “a” next-door to “b” more often?

Well, that’s easy! The more kinetic energy you pump into the system, the further apart things get pushed!! (Duh.) In fact our transportation network here in the USA is a fantastic system for continuously manufacturing “needs” for more – and bigger – and longer – high-pressure pipes. Which, in turn, continuously manufactures “needs” for more energy, more machinery, more development, and more land. It’s quite the positive-feedback loop: great for investors, businesses, units of government, and employment. Tax revenues grow; the DOT and other bureaucracies swell; and politicians buy votes with the pork they deliver to the Highway Lobby. Meanwhile society can avoid balancing current expenditures with current income. You could base a whole damned economy on it. For a while, anyway.

Back to my point. For various reasons, lots of people think there are serious problems with transportation. So let’s consider some of the “solutions” that are being proposed.

(1) The overwhelming majority seem to think the way to solve the problem is to expand the high-pressure pipe network. Well, “think” isn’t really the right word; it’s their default behavior that does the thinking…and the voting. That’s why their default solution is mostly about accommodating more and more big, fast molecules. True, many people SAY they want the small and the slow to have a fair shake, but they don’t really mean it. Momentum speaks louder than words.

(2) Some people – a distinct minority – believe that if enough low-pressure pipes are added to the network, most of the molecules will have a choice as to which pipes they use: high-pressure pipes if they want to be big and fast, or low-pressure pipes if they want to be small and slow.

It’s a nice idea, but there are serious problems with it. Maybe even insurmountable ones, especially if we are at all serious about the “most” having a “choice”. Why? The existing network consists primarily of high-pressure pipes. Even if we focus on areas where molecules tend to congregate, most are places which are richly interconnected with high-pressure pipes but poorly connected with low-pressure ones. Installing new low-pressure pipes parallel to so many existing high-pressure pipes would cost a fortune. Maybe even an empire.

So who would pay for it? If you consider where the big, fast molecules REALLY like to live (exurbia), you will find damn few low-pressure pipes. Why? Avoiding the costs of low-pressure pipes is one big reason why so many big, fast molecules move there! Not only that, but most of these upwardly-mobile molecules spend most of their time “off the reservation”, congesting high-pressure pipes in places where they don’t BEGIN to pay their fair share. The system is already bankrupt, running on IOUs from children who can’t even vote yet.

Then there is the matter of proximity. Fast molecules couldn't care less about destination “a” being close to “b” – ten or twenty miles seem mighty short when you’re really truckin’ down a high-pressure pipe. But pity the slow molecules! Even if there is a low-pressure pipe running parallel to a high-pressure one (so the slow guys don’t run the risk getting whacked), the TIME it takes can be a killer. Moving slow, it feels like darn near everything is just too far away.

Last, we must not forget that all parallel pipes eventually have to intersect. And it’s a tough engineering challenge to build these intersections so that the small, slow molecules can safely cross the high-pressure pipes. Especially when you have big, fast molecules who don’t much like being restrained. You know, high momentum dudes who behave as though having to wait for slowpokes is…well…an insult! “Move over, a**hole!!” “Get the f**k out of my road!”

(3) A few people have their fingers crossed that the energy supply for the high-momentum molecules will eventually dwindle; the pressure will go down in the high-pressure pipes; and somehow the system will become more “humane” for small, slow guys. Maybe they are right. Probably they are right. It might take a while, though. And it’s sort of weird, expecting pipes to get “humane”. Like “pipes” caused the problem in the first place! Meanwhile, it’s obvious that the energy supply for the big and fast hasn’t run out yet. So many of the folks who are waiting for the dwindling conclude the best they can do right now is to buckle up themselves and their kids inside a big-ish molecule too. OK, one that’s not-so-big…but not-so-small, either! Then if they get whacked by a really big, fast molecule, it won’t be a guaranteed death sentence.

(4..?) Might there be another possibility – one which doesn’t require huge numbers of additional pipes…or…having to run out of energy? Like, what would happen if millions of molecules…just…began to choose to have less momentum more often? Hmm…maybe when we brush our teeth tonight, we could look in the mirror for clues about how to make it happen.

The Solution to Jobless Growth

2010-08-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

The solution to Jobless Growth is:

Growthless Jobs! Now that wasn't so hard, was it? Reverse the words and Presto! The solution to all of our problems.

Really, it makes sense. Consider what we have right now in our economy. Lots of businessmen (and women) who set out with the explicit intention to sell toasters, cars, corn chips, open-heart surgery – stuff like that. Lots of investors with a laser-beam focus on getting Higher Returns. And darn near every consumer bound and determined to get More Stuff for Less.

Given these intentions, what have we got to show for it? Exactly what one would expect: lots of toaster manufacturing; profits on toaster sales; toasters in our basements, in our attics and storage lockers, on our garage sale tables. More toasters than we need…and unemployed people who have good reason to worry about not being needed.

Hmm…no need for so many toasters…not enough need for people who need to be needed. Could it be that our intentions are the problem? More precisely, a LACK of intent? A BIG lack? A black hole, in fact?

Amidst all our intentions to make and sell and profit on and acquire more toasters than we need (along with more than enough other stuff), where is our intention to need people?

Could this have something to do with passing the buck? OK, we all love to blame Government whenever unemployment rears its ugly head. Business executives with factories run by automated machines don't even blink when they scream bloody murder about how Government is preventing them from creating jobs. Even the candidates play along, making all kinds of promises about the jobs THEY are going to “create”…after (of course!) they blame the opposition party for unemployment...and every other ill in the world.

But what if the whole thing was a ruse, a huge lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid yet another Inconvenient Truth? Forget outsourcing toaster-manufacturing, what happens in an economy when darn near everyone "outsources" responsibility for making sure that people who need to be needed…are needed?

The thing that makes it really tough is this: we can get More Stuff for Less – and Higher Returns to boot! – when we outsource employment to fossil fuels, machines, and automation. Year after year, more Productivity, more “saving” labor. What the heck, who needs other human beings these days?

Oops, we still need them to consume the stuff our machines are making. So…is there some way to make machines that consume? THAT would be sweet! Cars that drive themselves to McDonalds and order high-fructose corn syrup (straight up) from serving-robots. That's right, skip the distillery, skip turning most of the corn into cow-manure (another disposal problem!), we're talking about hyper-mobile, perpetually-hungry consumers that wanna LiveGreen GoYellow, baby.

Ye-ha! Kick back and watch the DOW soar! Who knows, with the ethanol subsidy AND “smart” cars ordering corn syrup for themselves at every drive-thru in America, maybe the corn surplus would take care of itself…

Anyway, is a bit of Luddism in order here? As in, enough to make sure that we need one-another? And how about choosing to need our own labor once in a while? Instead of using our legs mostly to press accelerator and brake pedals, what if we used them more often for (Gasp!) self-locomotion? Getting from “a” to “b”?

I got a lot more to say. You want it?

The Problem of Jobless Growth

2010-08-13T16:42:00.001-07:00

First our Leaders told us there were “Green Shoots”. Then they began to tout the Recovery. More recently they have expressed their regrets that the Recovery appears to be Jobless. And now the Recovery itself is floundering.

This is what Business as Usual delivers in 2010: Jobless Growth - when there is any Growth at all.

Meanwhile we all know about Earth’s biophysical limits – and the terrible messes we’ve gotten into by pretending those limits don’t exist. On this (still-) living, richly interconnected planet, economic Growth IS the problem!

So is this a case of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”? Maybe not. Ready to think out of the box? I mean, REALLY out?

(Hint: sometimes the solution becomes obvious when you look at a problem from another direction. So if the problem is “Jobless Growth”…)

Give up? OK, the answer is...drum roll...

{see next post}

The Spill and You

2010-07-07T10:11:00.001-07:00

The following is a transcript of my comments last evening to the trustees of the Village of Oregon, Wisconsin, USA. Perhaps you, dear reader, might find inspiration in it to get up on your hind legs and say something along these lines to your elected public servants...

If anything is clear to me, it is that if we fail to transform the public conversation about responsibility, we will fail period. We will never know whether seeds such as these will bear fruit if we do not plant them.

I am here this evening to speak with you about choosing a relationship to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not just as individual citizens, but as trustees, as stewards of the public good.

So how might you choose to relate to the spill?

First, you could choose that there isn’t time to discuss the oil spill right now – you already have your hands full with urgent Village business…like budget shortfalls! As someone who has served on the Board, I would respect this choice. I mean that. But please hear me out anyway; I will give you some specific, practical recommendations in a minute or two.

So what else? You could choose that the spill, bad as it is, has nothing to do with us and how we live here. It’s a free country; it’s a free market; and people have a right to burn as much gas as they want.

You could choose that OK, the spill might have something to do with our way of life here, but it isn’t any of your business (or mine!) to tell people how to live. Who wants to rock the boat?

You could choose that if we don’t burn deepwater oil – heck, oil from anywhere else for that matter…well, someone else will. With a fungible commodity like oil, no consumer is responsible.

You could choose that the spill isn’t our fault because we get most of our oil from Canada…where they are clear-cutting forests, strip-mining tar sands, and burning a lot of natural gas to cook out crude. And you’d be right: about 80% of our motor fuel comes from Canadian tar sands right now.

You could choose to react to news of the spill like millions of busy consumers. “OMG those poor pelicans! Did you see John Steward’s spoof about BP last night? It was hilarious! Anyway, they need to nail the jerks who did this…{look at watch}…Oops, gotta go! Have to run my kid to a soccer game in McFarland… Hmm…where the devil are my car keys?”

You could choose that some “they” out there is to blame for the spill…and that “they” had better punish the bad guys…and make “them” clean up the mess…and do a better job enforcing regulations.

You could choose that advanced technology will provide us with all the clean energy we need. Cool! So all we need to do is sit back, wait, and buy an electric car when they are available.

You could choose that we have no choice but to burn gasoline. By God we need it! End of conversation.

You could choose that OK, we do have some choices here in Oregon about how much gasoline we burn…and yes, we should all do our part!...

…but realistically we don’t have that many options, and realistically, the little bit of oil that we use here (or don’t use) can’t possibly make any difference, so…

…really, what we need is a NATIONAL energy policy; we need higher prices to force people to conserve; obviously the President and Congress need to tackle these big issues. The most important thing for us to do is to elect the right candidates…and support the right legislation.

Here is another possibility. You could choose that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has everything to do with how we have chosen to live here. You could choose that a future without such spills – without raping the landscape – without occupations and wars over oil and other resources – without deprivation and misery visiting upon our children – you could choose that all these things have everything to do with how we choose to live here tomorrow.

You could choose that as citizens we have a duty to act. You could choose that as elected officials you will seek possibilities to learn, participate and be inspired; to inform, advocate, and enact.

I promised specifics:

(1) Commit to bringing commuter transit to Oregon. Put the wheels back on the Oregon-Area Public Transit Committee and get it rolling again. Tell trustee {name of the guy who chairs the moribund committe} that you’re on board. Let the Dane County RTA board know that YOU want to help make commuter transit a reality here. Work with the RTA. Attend its meetings if you can; keep abreast of proceedings in any case. The RTA board is looking for members of an Advisory Committee – especially representatives from outside the current RTA boundaries. How about volunteering?

(2) Tell the citizenry you believe that all of us have a duty to walk lightly on Earth. Tell them you want Oregon to be a community where it is NORMAL for us to walk…and roll about in wheelchairs…and ride bicycles…and push strollers…and pull Radio Fliers – and where it is NORMAL for us to share transit. These things work best when we do them together! That is why it is so important to bring transit service here.

(3) Choose to walk and bike when you “don’t have enough time”…when it is too hot, too cold, too wet, too dark. Choose to walk and bike when the streets are plowed but many sidewalks and bike paths are snow-covered and slippery. Choose to push a stroller to the library (or pull some groceries home in a wagon) when the curb-cuts are plowed shut. Roughly a third of your constituents cannot drive, and most don’t have access to 24/7 chauffeur service. Many motorists who could walk and bike are waiting to be led and inspired. More people than you might suspect are afraid to be alone on our sidewalks and streets. They are hoping and waiting for me…and you…to take the first step. You won’t learn the first thing about getting around in Oregon without a car – from the inside of a windshield. Choose to learn.

Productivity Plunges

2010-03-31T11:10:00.001-07:00

April 1, 2011 New York, NY

A Bloomberg poll of leading US economists found that 79% were “shocked” or “dismayed” by the recently-readjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that labor productivity in the United States plunged by 13.8% in 2010. Asked how they felt about the corresponding sharp decline in U3 unemployment – from 10.1% to 6.3% - 31% of these economists said improved employment numbers were “welcome”, but 88% considered the correlation (between falling productivity and falling unemployment) “counterintuitive” or “irrelevant”. All agreed that the top priority must be to return to increased productivity and healthy economic growth as rapidly as possible.

In addition to the improved employment situation there were other signs of progress last year. The US trade deficit fell by 18.4% in 2010 as demand for petroleum products and imported consumer goods “fell off a cliff”. Consumption of energy overall, demand for minerals and metals, and purchases of snack food products all showed steep declines, and total vehicle-miles-traveled dropped an astonishing 13.4%. Household debt fell by 15.8% as consumers saved more and spent less.

Climate scientists were delighted to announce that US emissions of greenhouse gasses in 2010 went down by 12.6% - a result which bolsters Stanford University Professor Clausius Carnot’s contention that nuclear and renewable energy sources can provide much larger percentages of US electricity usage when electricity consumption declines. Professor Carnot has generated much controversy – and elicited more than a little scorn from the Wall Street Journal editorial board – for his radical theory that climate change is being driven by “an excess of economic metabolism”.

The good news extends to health as well. “People are happier when they have useful work to do”, noted Dr. Howard Frumkin of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. “Moreover, with the steep reductions in automobile usage and petroleum consumption, more and more people are employing their legs and arms to do physical work. When it becomes normal for people to walk or bike to the grocery store and other nearby destinations, this definitely hurts the auto industry, the oil industry, the roadbuilders, and so on. Hell, it even hurts the health-care industry, because obesity is the primary engine of growth for the medical sector of our economy. So we have this weird situation where the economy is shrinking but people are better off. We’re in uncharted waters.”

But none of America’s most prominent economic thinkers is willing to concede that a mere year’s worth of evidence might disprove long-established economic theory. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times notes, “Everyone knows that the only way to grow the economy is to increase labor productivity – to grow output of goods and services per hour of human labor. And everyone knows that the only way to maintain healthy levels of employment is to increase consumption sufficiently to offset the decreases in employment per unit of output. This is Econ 101, for God’s sake.”

“So even if we presume Earth is flat, how could less employment for fossil fuels and less employment for machines translate into more employment for human beings? This sounds like the ravings of the Luddites; like Marx and his ridiculous ‘crisis of surplus labor’. Well, we are a lot smarter now; smart enough to know that such ideas are pure bunk.”

Non-Violent Transportation

2010-03-16T20:49:00.001-07:00

Want more Peace on Earth? And more living Earth available for Peace?

Choose Non-Violent Transportation.

Small. Because the Footprints of human feet and bicycle tires are miniscule relative to the Footprints of cars.

Slow. Make wherever you are...the place where you want to be.

Gentle. Living things which might cross your path have a right not merely to not be harmed by you, but to not be afraid of you.

I Am Scared

2010-02-19T09:12:00.000-08:00

I am scared to death of scared people who "overcome" their fears by surrounding themselves with automobiles.

I am really scared of scared people who don't realize – or won't admit – that by "solving" their fears with power and speed and crash-resistant steel, they force this "solution" on everyone who lives in their midst.

I am scared of you. I am scared of many people in my own family. I am scared to say anything, because when I am scared, I nearly always scare other people. I am terrified of how scared we are.

Sometimes, in my fear, I have struck out with angry words at people who force their vehicular “solution” on the world. I have found myself surrounded by people who vociferously condemn my words. I have found myself bereft of allies in the battle against those who “speak” with a metallic force that often maims and kills. Or perhaps I should say, in the battle against the fear that drives the speakers.

Sitting comfortably on our rear ends inside a room and talking and or watching a video will make exactly zero (0) difference where it matters – on the streets and sidewalks of our communities. Nor will casting a ballot once every two or four or six years. No one else is going to make Change happen for us.

Solvitur ambulando.

Communities That Walk

2010-02-03T14:06:00.000-08:00

Recently a fellow pedestrian/bicycle/transit advocate checked Walkscore.com and learned that his address in the Williamson Street neighborhood of Madison, Wisconsin rated a score of 91 – “highly walkable”. Unfortunately, one of his rewards for choosing to live where a top-notch rating is possible is to endure exceptionally high levels of automobile traffic – much of it generated by the tens of thousands of Madison-area commuters who regularly drive through his part of the Isthmus but reside where Walkscores are lower, often much lower. This is typical for "walkable" neighborhoods in most cities and villages in the United States.

Typical but not right. If things were fair, those with high Walkscores – especially those who actually walked a lot – would be rewarded with automobile traffic as light and calm as, say, the private streets of the gated golf course community in my village…or the secluded country estates occupied by ultra-high-VMT exurbanites scattered throughout nominally-rural Dane County. (This is a major, albeit seldom acknowledged, social/environmental justice issue, comparable to – and often correlating with – racial and socio-economic segregation.)

Even so, Walkscore.com does not begin to tell the whole story. There is often a huge chasm between potential and reality.

Case in point: my wife and I reside in one of Madison’s numerous bedroom suburbs – the Village of Oregon, population 8,807. Despite being much smaller than Madison, and despite the prevailing suburban character, Walkscore for our street address is 69 – relatively good. In fact I can’t think of many places in Madison where it would be more convenient to bicycle and walk to the grocery store, K-12 schools, preschool, playgrounds, parks, playing fields, library, coffee shop, hardware store, pharmacies, church, vet, post office, copy/shipping shop, barber, etc. We have an absurd number of bank branches within ½ mile, a decent variety of restaurants, health clubs, and so on. Oh, our dentist is less than two blocks away; eye doctor is three, and family medical provider is a bit over four.

Unusual for Oregon? Absolutely not. Given the abundance and variety of frequented destinations here, and the spatial arrangements of destinations and residences, I would guess that more than a quarter of Village residents would have comparable Walkscores. Moreover, Oregon has plenty of sidewalks, crosswalks, and traffic signals with pedestrian-activated buttons. We even have a fairly extensive system of bike lanes and paths for a municipality of our size.

Despite all these “walkability” features, the ratio of driving-age Village residents who drive rather than walk or bike to destinations within the Village itself is probably 50:1 or more. Why? If proximities and infrastructure were the primary factors in the mode-split equation, Oregon’s streets and sidewalks would be buzzing with self-locomoted human beings. They are not.

Thus we must look elsewhere for causality: our norms and expectations; our automobile-scaled perception of time and distance; our sense of entitlement to the convenience, comfort, and security of our own multi-ton armored personnel carrier. And looming above all of these factors is our obstinate refusal to confront yet another inconvenient truth: lifestyles rooted in automobile dependence poison the ground against the growth of a human-scale culture where it is safe, practical, convivial, and – most of all – normal to walk and bike and use transit. Automobile dependence in Oregon, as in most of Dane County, is near-total and incredibly tenacious. Despite five years of crusading here I have not made any noticeable dent in mode split, not even among "sustainability" types. I suspect many advocates elsewhere feel just as impotent. Why?

I believe one big reason is that we often undermine our efforts with the vocabulary we use. We usually talk about the characteristics of things (streets, neighborhoods, cars, etc.) rather than focusing on behaviors – and the responsibilities of citizens. Terms like "walkable", "bicycle-friendly", and "transit-supportive density" are like bumper stickers: in and of themselves they make absolutely no difference. Meanwhile our use of such language tacitly-but-inexorably diverts our perception of causality away from human beings.

God help us, we need pedestrian-oriented people. Bicycle-oriented people. Transit-oriented people. We cannot zone these people into existence or force them into existence by blocking automobile-centric developments. Hell, such people cannot even consume themselves into existence by shopping in the Green Aisle! Thus our challenge is to create people who vote with their feet. When that happens, the places we seek will occur.

How to create such people? Not by telling them that someone else is to blame for America's auto-addicted way of life; that someone else owes them easy solutions; that someone else has the power to make a truly-green "Transportation/Access Revolution" happen.

First we must show people how their choices and behaviors – in combination with our own – literally create our community week-by-week and year-by-year. We must emphasize that we all have much to learn, and that to succeed we need the kinds of wisdom that can only be gained from experience. Thus we must challenge people to just get out there and begin occupying their communities as human beings again. Choose at least one thing they do on a regular basis via car, and do it..or them…without a car. No excuses. No waiting. No passing the buck. Experience what-is. Let it soak in. Start to imagine what-might-be. Then take the next step – literally.

So long as well-meaning people remain behind those damned windshields (waiting for third-party “solutions”), they will not learn the first thing about what we-the-people collectively must do to create…not "walkable communities"…but “communities that walk"; communities that bike; and communities that have enough of us walking and biking to make transit viable. Hello! Habitat follows behavior.

Not in Kansas Anymore

2009-11-27T09:49:00.000-08:00

Why are we surprised that unemployment continues to rise? Why do we expect the GOVERNMENT to do something about it?

We've spent the last 200 years mechanizing and automating everything possible. Substituting fossil fuels for human labor and computer circuits for cogitation. "Labor-saving" has become "labor-destroying". Yet it never occurs to us that there could be such a thing as too much productivity.

As James Howard Kunstler says, “It’s all good”…as long as the economy keeps growing every year. But planet Earth ain’t getting any bigger. The highest-quality, most easily extracted resources are gone, and now we’re strip-mining an Arizona-sized chunk of Canadian forest for tarry goo, and even thinking about scraping the barrel at 25,000 feet below sea level. How do you spell “desperation”?

Plus there are limits to how much credit you can vacuum out of the future to jack up present consumption. So when people get frugal, when hundreds of millions of Americans wake up and realize that we don’t really need all the junk we’re buying, unemployment skyrockets. People are terrified that no one else needs them. With good reason. Decade after decade, our economy has “decided” that more and more of the essential jobs should be done by machines.

As citizens, we sure as the devil don’t ACT like we want other Americans to have jobs. Except we’re not citizens anymore – we’re cogs in the economy. As consumers our fidelity is to the lowest prices – getting as much as possible for as little as possible – flaunting our wealth – dying with the most toys. As investors we want the highest rate of return. If these things are incompatible with living wages, health care, honoring pension obligations, supporting local communities…well to hell with them. We’re rational, after all.

But what about good-old-fashioned self-reliance? Right. These days we don’t even want to employ our own legs to get from “a” to “b”. Of course it doesn’t help that 50+ years of Happy Motoring has destroyed pedestrian-oriented, transit-supportive communities.

Yes, Greenspan and his disciples are clueless. But so are people who think that with a dose of hard reality – and if only the government stops “interfering” – the economy will eventually turn around and grow and everything will be OK again.

Sorry, we ain’t in Kansas anymore.

Willful Ignorance

2009-11-08T10:17:00.000-08:00

Ask yourself why so many of us expect "the government" to compensate for jobs lost to increases in labor productivity (i.e. output of a good or service per unit input of labor.) Ask how it is possible we CELEBRATE increases in labor productivity even as we cringe at rising unemployment. Just how stupid are we?

And what about those of us who believe the biophysical limitations of Earth all but guarantee that Mankind's consumption of resources will soon shrink, and shrink dramatically? Who have concluded from the recent financial crisis that we have substantially exceeded our powers to vacuum ever-more credit from the future in order to stimulate ever-higher consumption in the present? Who recognize that marginal increases in material consumption throughout much of the industrialized world often have a NEGATIVE correlation with human well-being?

Is there any chance that we-the-consumers and we-the-investors will be willing to shift our fidelities from the lowest prices and highest rates of return to intentional, meaningful, fulfilling employment for one-another…and for ourselves? Doesn't our love affair with the automobile prove that we don't even want to employ our own legs?

What shall become of human employment in a future of limits? If the means of production are not widely held, what will be the fate of those who own little or none of it? Is a Darwinian economic religion compatible with love for one another? And even if all these other factors could be overcome, are our human natures suited for life without needful labor?

Manufactured Uselessness

2009-10-09T12:16:00.000-07:00

The pervasive, willful ignorance which characterizes nearly all public discouse concerning unemployment is stunning. How can we be so blind to what is so obvious - that Growth makes the "crisis of surplus labor" worse and worse?

Consider the facts:

(1) We-the-consumers demand the lowest (internalized) costs
(2) We-the-investors demand the highest (internalized) rates of return
(3) Any business which ignores these demands is quickly rendered extinct in the Marketplace
(4) Therefore we mechanize and automate and outsource everything possible...
(5) ...replace human labor with coal and oil and every other easy-to-extract fossil fuel we can rip out of the Earth...
(6) ...throw power tools and robotic machines at every job we can…
(7) ...and then we're astonished that unemployment is a problem

DUH! God help us, really, we're too clueless to help ourselves. We cannot imagine such things as too much Progress or too much Productivity. We cannot see – cannot admit – that one of the main "outputs" of the Growth Economy is Manufactured Uselessness.

This is the mother of all third rails in American political and social discourse: no one will admit - in public - that Productivity has severed tens of millions of Americans from employment and vocations which are associated with real human needs. And not only are these workers TOTALLY UNNECESSARY for the production and delivery of essential goods and services, but less and less of their labor is needed for the provision of ever-more extravagent luxuries, indulgences, status symbols.

Always and forever we are told the solution is More Growth. "Drink more bottled water!" "Fly to Disneyland!" "Buy a vacation home, a bigger riding lawnmower – we need JOBS!" But every year it takes fewer and fewer people to provide that bottle of water, that vacation trip, that vinyl-clad McMansion, that gas-guzzling go-cart which happens to cut grass.

Heaven knows most of us don't need more stuff any more than we need the spiritually-corrosive manipulations which marketers use to foist more stuff upon us. Such things as greed and gluttony, lust and pride and envy are – as they have always been – vices, moral hazards, threats to family and community. Meanwhile we are reaching and exceeding the biophysical limits of Earth.

But mainstream economists and businessmen and politicians live in holy terror of thrift and frugality – if the consumer isn't spending "enough" on credit, then by God the government had better do so. Libertarians and Austrian-school types fervently believe that balanced budgets, minimal government, and a truly free Free Market will solve everything; they don't seem to worry about the fact that half the working population in America would be jobless if our nation REALLY got serious about living within our means. At least Keynesian liberals and progressives give a damn about employment for working people, but they focus so much of their energy on demonizing super-rich elites that they fail to recognize Productivity is a double-edged sword. And Productivity may become far more sinister than even the Luddites imagined:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Perhaps we are so enamored of our various Balkanized groups/ways of thinking that nothing less than a catastrophe will open our minds to real "Change". Is this why so many of our wise ancestors have deemed the human condition tragic?

Economic Liberty and Moral Chains

2009-09-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

Men are qualified for economic liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. (With apologies to Edmund Burke)

When I hear Wall Street titans, corporate executives, and their innumerable sycophants in the media and academia protest that the carnage wrought by unchecked greed is in fact the fault of a government which failed to adequately control “animal spirits”, I want to vomit.

Consider the absurdity of such a claim.

(1) Wall Street and corporations are not responsible for self-restraint.
(2) Therefore it is the duty of government and regulators to force them to behave.
(3) Regulators are appointed and approved by politicians.
(4) Politicians gain power via elections.
(5) Elections – especially for national office – are overwhelmingly driven by campaign contributions and the wholesale purchase of media-space (i.e. “free” speech).
(6) Day-to-day governance is powerfully shaped by lobbyists (i.e. more “free” speech).
(7) This “free” speech can best be described as “one dollar equals one vote”.
(8) Wall Street and giant corporations vote the most.

Complicated, eh? How is it possible that such flagrant buck-passing is so prevalent in our national discourse? Follow the money.

Urban? For What Species?

2009-08-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

It is unfortunate that we use words like "urban" and "city" to describe fundamentally different built environments - i.e. everything from sprawling habitats constructed for the convenience of homo automobilicus to compact habitats scaled for the species homo pedestricanus.

Of course here in the United States the main thrust of our economic activity over the past 60 years has been to expand habitat for homo automobilicus - which inevitably undermines, destroys, and prevents the formation of habitat for homo pedestricanus. No surprise, the larger, faster, more powerful species homo automobilicus is now dominant in most communities. The dearth of human life on the sidewalks of villages and small cities throughout the US attests to the lost struggle.

This victory may prove short-lived, however. Having suffocated millions of acres of bioproductive land beneath the highways and parking lots it needs to move and store its colossal population, homo automobilicus is now appropriating even more land for “food” production (i.e. biofuels). But it is unlikely that homo pedestricanus will have to suffer this seizure for much longer. Why? Because homo automobilicus will eventually collapse from its rapacious appetite. With an average weight of several tons, and given the fact that it travels at much higher speeds over much longer distances than the small, slow, localized species homo pedestricanus, homo automibilicus has far larger energetic requirements. It is by nature a carrion feeder, and basic thermodynamic laws make it highly unlikely that Earth's sustainable energy flows will prove adequate fare for a population of hundreds of millions.

History will almost certainly show that petroleum was the largest, most nutritious dead carcass humankind will ever find on Earth. Cheap oil alone has allowed homo automobilicus to gorge and breed to wildly unsustainable numbers, and the end of cheap oil spells its demise.

One would hope this implosion will not prevent homo pedestricanus from flourishing once again. But why must it come to this? If only the species homo sapiens were to discover enlightened self-restraint!

What's at Stake

2009-05-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

One starts off fighting for some relatively small thing – to establish a pedestrian-oriented town square, to protect a watershed, to head off yet another sprawling subdivision and strip mall. Gradually one realizes that one is fighting battle after battle against politically-connected elites who have the money and time to press their agendas until they get what they want; fighting against an omnipotent, rabidly-defended belief in the Growth Economy; indeed, fighting a war against the main trajectory of one's society.

It may be useful to ask what animates the opposition. I would say that at root is the primary – if seldom acknowledged – end-product of the Growth Economy: fear of being useless, without purpose, bound and fettered to a Leviathan that remorselessly destroys our needs for one-another no less effectively than it dismantles self-reliance.

Let us remember that Development is not the final aim of the planners and architects and contractors – they want something meaningful and creative to do with their lives. Nor is Development the end goal of the carpenters and drywallers and plumbers – they want be needed by others so they can earn a living. Development is not even the ultimate objective of those who develop to amass great wealth – they are merely hell-bent on gaining respect in a society that has made virtues of the Seven Deadly Sins.

I am coming to the conclusion that we will inevitably loose on the small things if we do not win the war. Given the stranglehold of Growth-fed media on the public consciousness, however, chances are slim that advocates for a sustainable way of life will be widely heard above the stupefying clamor of Commerce. If humankind is lucky, the limits of energy, natural resources, and/or debt will – in relatively short order – collapse the Growth Economy without widespread suffering and loss of life. But will Man learn from the experience that we are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to our disposition to put moral chains upon our own appetites?

Fatal Pace

2009-04-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

Oregon, Wisconsin USA

Our failure as a community to support and reward those who attempt to go about their lives at a walking or bicycling pace is bad enough. But the recent cyclist fatality near Brooklyn, Wisconsin reminds us that we-the-drivers often pose a life-and-death threat to non-motorists. The swift, the powerful, and the heavily-armored so thoroughly dominate most of our public thoroughfares today that merely walking or bicycling across them can be hazardous. (Walk or bicycle along them? Forget it!)

Our pervasive (if unintentional) disregard for the “least among us” – i.e. those annoyingly slow, small, vulnerable creatures called pedestrians and bicyclists – represents one of the most flagrant injustices in our society. Rather than joining the anthropogenically-motivated, we’ve made things even worse by withdrawing ever more frequently into our supersized vehicular exoskeletons. Many of us now consider a three-ton armored personnel carrier a practical necessity for conveying our youngster to extra-curricular activities. “My child needs to participate just like other normal children, and I need a big SUV to keep her safe!”

Unsurprisingly, our police and highway departments won’t slow drivers down enough to make it feel safe and be safe for non-motorists on our roads and highways. A more human pace would surely throw a wrench in our speed-addicted economy, and a voting majority that has become almost totally dependent on the automobile would not suffer any such disruption to the “Happy Motoring” way of life.

I cannot end this with a pep talk and some bullet-points. Not only is the Brooklyn cyclist’s death a tragedy; our sprawling, hyper-mobile, resource-gobbling way of life is a tragedy as well. And so long as we cling to our steering wheels; so long as our leaders deploy American troops all over Earth to ensure an uninterrupted flow of cheap energy into our tanks, nothing will change.

Sinking In

2009-04-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

This past weekend at my wife's family farm on County Highway D south of Madison, Wisconsin, we had a garage/estate sale to dispose of my brother-in-law's material possessions. Traffic was good - if one considers 99% of potential buyers using a motor vehicle to access 99% of their destinations to be desirable.

For once I kept my mouth shut about our nation's wars and occupations for oil, our addiction to driving everywhere, the enormous Environmental Footprint of homo automobilicus, etc. and just tried to sell my brother-in-law's stuff and thus cover his bills. Instead I used the occasion to quietly absorb the vast gulf between my beliefs versus our prevailing expectations and norms.

The overwhelming majority of people in these parts simply cannot imagine not driving everywhere. They lack any comprehension that their way of life undermines and destroys far more frugal - potentially even SUSTAINABLE - ways of living in their midst. Spending time there near that highway (a once-quiet country road which has morphed into a heavily congested two-lane commuter artery into Madison) I was stunned by the violence of movement. Seeing the vehicles that pulled into the yard, I was disgusted by the phenomenal size of many of them, especially when one considers they are used nearly all of the time for single-occupancy commuting and chauffeuring little Brittany to extra-cirricular activities rather than carpooling or hauling heavy, bulky stuff to jobsites.

What kind of power-mad, self-obsessed monsters have we become? So many people have collapsed their own identity into the identity of their motor vehicle(s). Motorcycle as lifestyle. Pickup truck as codpiece. Speed and power and restless movement as rebellion…against what? Everything branded, everything a logo and image. My own brother-in-law, God rest his soul, was a man who could express his love for his Harley and Suburban and Corvette far better than he could express love for humans; he bought into the Happy Motoring paradigm for the better part of his life. He may have been "book smart"; he certainly did well in the corporate world for a while; but he was a sucker for the perpetual dissatisfaction corporate America has to sell.

It strikes me as less and less likely that I can make any practical difference beyond my own household. This weekend helped me to realize that I have absolutely no idea how to engage most of my neighbors in discussing the issues and beliefs that really matter to me. More than a few - including a man I consider a very close friend - have already shut me off for rocking the boat.

This is Freedom?

2009-03-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

The following is a transcript of my comments in support of a Dane County Regional Transportation Authority, delivered to Sun Prairie and Madison Area Transportation Planning Board officials at a hearing in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on 4 Mar 2009. My “prop” for the occasion was a gasoline pump nozzle.

Do I support a Dane County Regional Transportation Authority? Absolutely. An RTA isn’t just about commuter rail in Madison – it is about real transportation choices all over Dane County, including commuter service in communities like Oregon and Stoughton and Sun Prairie.

That’s right: an RTA is about freedom of choice.

Now let’s think about that word “freedom”. Edmund Burke, an 18th century British philosopher whom many consider the father of modern conservativism, had this to say:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

---hold up nozzle

Do you think this is liberty? Do you think this is freedom? Do you think importing 60% of our oil a few years ago, importing 70% today, importing 80% and more tomorrow is independence?

---look around room

Do you think freedom is pretending that you and I are not addicted to oil?

Do you think freedom is refusing to connect the dots between where most of the remaining oil is… {pregnant pause}

…and where our country has deployed most of its incredibly powerful, incredibly expensive military forces?

---hands over eyes

Do you think freedom is closing your eyes to the inconvenient truth that blood was shed – and more blood will be shed – to put that tiger in your tank…and my tank…and every other tank driving down Highway 151 and Highway 14 and Highway 138 every weekday morning with only 1.1 people inside?

---hold up nozzle

Do you think the guys at the other end of this hose are our friends? Do you think a tube made of braided rubber is no less a shackle on our lives than ones made of forged steel?

My friends, is freedom is being ignorant of these facts – or worse, willfully, stubbornly blind to them?

I’ll tell you what freedom is.

Above all things, freedom is being honest with ourselves and each other. Because this isn’t just about our entitlements to guzzle what comes out of here…

---point out of nozzle

…we also have a great many obligations and responsibilities for what happens at the other end of the hose.

---point backwards from hose.

This is something we should be talking about here, in this room. It breaks my heart that we’re not.

Freedom is living in a community where you can stand up on your own hind legs once in a while and walk – actually WALK! – when you want to go somewhere. Real freedom of movement begins with…moving yourself!

Freedom is living where your child can ride her bicycle to play with her friends, not endless duty as child chauffeur…on top of both of you working to meet your car payments!

Freedom is neighbors cooperating for the common good, funding and building and sharing energy-efficient, land-conserving, public transportation together. Freedom is being a CITIZEN who says, “Yes! I want to invest my fair share in a better tomorrow!”

I will close by telling you what freedom could be.

Freedom would be living in peace with other people on Earth instead of hogging the lion’s share of resources for ourselves.

Freedom would be us weaving ourselves together rather than our cars driving us apart; giant corporations driving us into bankruptcy; and the economy driving us all insane with the terribly wicked lie that enough is never enough.

Freedom would be leaving behind a decent planet for our grandchildren.

The Secret

2009-02-21T14:03:00.000-08:00

What if the secret to more employment for people is less employment for machines? What if we were no less committed to “the least among us” than we are passionate about our vaunted economic and political theories? What if we really did put people first, firmly above climbing over others to get ahead ourselves?

If healthy, fulfilling, honorable work for everyone was our top priority, would tens of millions of Americans know – and a hundred million or more fear – that their fellow countrymen have no further need for their services?

What if more Growth for those of us already wallowing in stuff leads us away from true prosperity? What if a tide of material consumption that rises even further would drown humankind beneath depletion and ruin long before it lifted the leaking dinghies of the poorest of the poor? What if Edmund Burke’s warning is true: we are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to our disposition to put moral chains upon our own appetites?

Because the choice today – indeed, the choice for all time – remains very simple: to love and serve one another; or abandon ourselves to the pursuit of the lowest prices, the highest rates of return, and the opportunity to die with the most toys.

End of Consumption

2009-02-08T23:28:00.000-08:00

Set aside conventional wisdom for a moment, and consider a possibility with ramifications so disturbing that America’s leading politicians, economic experts, and media talking heads refuse to acknowledge them in public. To wit: the present economic implosion really WAS caused by inadequate consumption rather than the usual suspects – inflation of the money supply, precipitous suppression of the prime rate, reckless expansion of credit, aggressive promotion of patently untenable mortgages by government, the repackaging of said toxic mortgages by a host of corporate accomplices, the viral spread of risk, astronomical increases in leverage, and computerized hyper-chicanery by our financial “creative class”. This isn’t to say these factors did not complicate or exacerbate matters, but they are not the root cause (indeed, some are symptoms). Rather, it was the beginning of the end of the age of the consumption that made the collapse inevitable.

Yes, despite Herculean efforts to consume faster than ever before, American shoppers just couldn’t keep pace with what was needed for “healthy” economic growth. Thanks to unprecedented levels of productivity, the output of McMansions and Escalades and ARMs overshot the abilities of our seemingly-insatiable markets to absorb them. Was it because too many consumers still cling to antiquated concepts like “frugality” and “modesty” and "thrift"? Certainly not! Having been incontrovertibly discredited by modern economic theory, such incendiary notions have been almost entirely expunged from our national consciousness, and fortunately no one listens to the handful of contrarians who profess them. So we must not let their censorious rantings about the evils of greed distract us from grasping the real catastrophe: in practice if not in spirit, Americans are falling ever further behind in the never-ending race to consume more than enough.

One can be forgiven for suspecting lack of money was the problem. Many years ago, when the economy managed to survive on a restricted diet of savings-based consumption, current levels of spending would have seemed ludicrous. But as mechanization and automation made goods and services cheaper and cheaper, saving before consuming wasn’t good enough to maintain profits or stave off unemployment. Thus, over time, more and more spending money had to be sucked out of the future, and the velocity of money in our globally-interconnected financial nervous system now routinely approaches the speed of light. And America’s creditors were more than willing to fund deficit consumption, right up to the collapse. No, the problem was not one of insufficient money supply.

With plenty of credit available to sop up surging output, why did Americans falter? Could it have been post traumatic shopping disorder? Not enough aisle-time in the day? Were precious hours wasted socializing at Starbucks rather than piling up savings at Target? Did skyrocketing obesity impede the vital flow of human traffic shuffling from parking lots to Big Boxes? Was it carpal tunnel from swiping credit cards? Did renting one more storage locker to stow surfeit stuff not seem worth the adrenalin rush of another 24 hour sale? Was it because auto designers ran out of room for more cup holders?

We may never know what made a once-proud nation of indefatigable shop-till-you-drop shoppers drop out. But even if we did, it’s probably too late to save America now.

Independence vs Splendid Isolation

2009-01-29T17:45:00.000-08:00

Surely one of the most elemental, fundamental forms of independence is self-locomotion: walking and running, meandering and strolling, riding a bicycle or rolling one’s wheelchair, pushing a baby stroller to the library or pulling a Radio Flier home from the grocery store. Yet in the past 60 years our society has done its utmost to undermine and destroy this independence.

Didn’t we realize that a house out in the country would make it impossible for our child to literally skip on over to friends’ houses? Didn’t we see that all the driving we and our neighbors would do meant living in terror that our adolescent would ride his bicycle beyond our “safe” cul-de-sac? Didn’t we anticipate that building the new school at the far edge of town diminished possibilities for teenagers in the former heart of the village to walk to football practice?

Is all the “splendid isolation” in our lives – seclusion within spacious houses and fenced yards and climate-controlled motor vehicles – worth it? Is importing 70% of our car fuel “independence”? If we would only stop and think, we would know better. But where I live (Oregon, Wisconsin, population 8,721), few are willing to even admit these mistakes. Thus I am at a loss where to begin. This is what frightens me most.

Missing the Bottom Line

2009-01-18T12:45:00.000-08:00

On 14 January 2009 the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) issued a press release titled “Energy Efficiency Programs Can Realistically Reduce Growth in Electricity Consumption by 22%, According to EPRI”:

http://tinyurl.com/8mz5c7

Shortly thereafter GreenBiz.com posted a synopsis of the EPRI press release titled “Growth in Energy Use Could Drop 22 Percent by 2030 Under Right Conditions: Report”:

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2009/01/15/energy-use

After reading both the press release and synopsis it struck me they failed to highlight that even with the efficiency programs, US electrical consumption is projected to increase significantly between now and 2030 – a highly inconvenient truth if one considers 80% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to be a high priority. Closer examination shows that neither press release nor synopsis listed bottom line numbers – a spin tactic which is endemic in Washington. The fact that EPRI did this should not surprise anyone; one naturally expects an industry trade organization to be an industry shrill. But perhaps we should be less tolerant of “greenwashing” from a “greenwhatever.com” group. My letter to the editor of GreenBiz.com follows. Note that I CC:d the editor of the EPRI website as well:

--------------

Dear Editor:

I would like to offer a friendly critique regarding the GreeBiz.com news posting "Growth in Energy Use Could Drop 22 Percent by 2030 Under Right Conditions: Report":

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2009/01/15/energy-use

Titles like this one tend to be confusing – and it is no coincidence that politicians very often use similar language to describe absolute increases in spending (or debt) as decreases in the projected rate of increase in spending (or deficit). Casual readers might well conclude from this title that the efficiency programs could reduce consumption itself by 22%.

Crunching the numbers in the EPRI press release, it would appear that the EIA {US Energy Information Agency} expects US electrical consumption to increase by about 25% between now and 2030 under business-as-usual conditions (1.0107^21), while EPRI believes efficiency programs could reduce this to an increase of about 19% (1.0083^21) over the same period. Put another way, the efficiency programs would thereby cut growth by 6% (25%-19%) – a number which sounds much less impressive than 22%. I'm not sure where EPRI obtained the 22% figure (it is neither the
quotient of ((.25-.19)/.25) nor (.25-.19)/.19)). Nor is it clear how the "ideal" limit of 0.68% growth would affect the other statistics.

And this brings me to another point: neither your title and synopsis nor the EPRI press release provide the reader with the far more important bottom-line numbers: US electrical energy consumption now; EIA projections for consumption in 2030 under business-as-usual conditions; and EPRI projections for consumption in 2030. Even though the 14 New York Cities statistic IS absolute, it is more anecdotal than enlightening.

Lastly, the title fails to make it clear that this is electrical consumption.

Suggestion for a better title: "Report: Efficiency Programs Could Slow Growth in US Electricity Demand from 25% to 19% Over Next 21 Years"

And then, since you are providing the synopsis anyway, the opening paragraph could include bottom-line data: "US electrical consumption, which was ___ billion kilowatt-hours in 2008, is projected by the US Energy Information Agency to increase to ___ billion kilowatt-hours by 2030 – an increase of 25%. But according to a recent Electric Power Research Institute report, efficiency programs could provide a "reduction wedge" of 6% or more…"

The reduction wedge idea, which appears to have gained widespread usage in conjunction with climate change work, is an excellent way to communicate this data.

Sincerely,

Hans Noeldner, Mechanical Engineer

Rail Efficiencies

2008-12-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

Having recently traveled from my home near Madison, Wisconsin to Pontiac, Michigan using rail as much as possible (Metra commuter rail from Harvard, Illinois to Chicago and thence Amtrak to Pontiac) it is clear to me that investments in rail-based transportation could yield substantial environmental and social benefits in this region of the United States – primary among them a massive reduction in automobile-centric sprawl. The synergy between rail transit and dense, pedestrian-oriented urban habitat is especially clear in the Chicago heartland. Her leaders – God bless them! – never allowed their transit system to collapse, much less be systematically dismantled by transit-averse business interests.

However, I am troubled by the various claims I've seen over the years regarding energy consumption and CO2 emissions per passenger-mile for trains/streetcars versus automobiles versus airplanes. Environmental organizations and sustainability advocates routinely assert that energy consumption for passenger rail is much "greener" than driving or flying. But Tables 2.13 and 2.14 in the Department of Energy's Transportation Energy Data Book #27 indicate that existing Amtrak intercity passenger rail is only 25% more efficient than the fleet average for cars; furthermore, Amtrak is only 18% more efficient than air travel!

Given the greater-than 80% reductions in GHG emissions we need to achieve in the coming decades, and given the fact that new CAFÉ standards mandate a 40% improvement in the mileage of cars and SUVs by 2020, efficiency gains from passenger rail of 18% to 25% seem paltry. Moreover, due to basic laws of aerodynamics, the efficiency of high speed rail (i.e. trains moving at 150-300 mph) will inevitably be less than trains moving at 50-100 mph. While I cannot recall the source at present, I am quite sure I have seen credible data within the last five years which indicated that Bullet Trains in Japan were no more energy-efficient on a passenger-mile basis than airplanes.

Of course the real issue vis a vis energy and CO2 is the practical potential for these transportation modes in the future, not the existing efficiencies of each as currently deployed. During the past half-century, aerospace companies (with lavish financial support from the Department of Defense) have pursued the most ambitious research and development programs by far of any “transportation” industry in the United States. Along the way, improvements in engines, aerospace materials, and aircraft designs have yielded astonishing increases in the efficiency of air transport (almost ten-fold). And even though they vigorously marketed absurdly inefficient cars in the '60's and then gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks more recently, automobile companies also made notable investments in R&D during the same time period; consequently the energy efficiency of engines and transmissions were substantially improved (it is the sheer size and weight of SUVs and pickup trucks which make them gas hogs, not their drive-trains).

Meanwhile, passenger rail locomotives and rolling stock in our nation changed very little even as ridership plummeted (until recently) and domestic engineering activity all but ground to a halt. Thus we must ask how efficient our passenger trains could be if they were constructed with aerospace materials, up-to-date engineering, etc. What if hybrid drives and regenerative braking were widely deployed? What if more trains were electrified? What if the expansion of electrified rail were coordinated with upgrading the national electrical grid? Having languished for so long, surely our passenger railroads are ripe for major improvements!

And there are sound reasons to believe that investing in rail technologies rather than airplanes or automobiles is likely to produce the biggest efficiency gains overall. Thanks to many decades of top-notch engineering, aircraft have already approached their theoretical efficiency limits; thus spending billions more on R&D probably won't change efficiencies by more than a percent or two. Similar logic applies to automobile R&D generally, although electric cars and battery technologies might prove to be an excellent gamble. Even so, such breakthroughs in "automotive" technology might be used to equal or greater advantage in trains rather than cars. Given the nature of "fixed costs", it is usually much cheaper to install a particular technological improvement in a single unit – say, a locomotive that moves 250 people – than to install that improvement in many units – say, 250 cars that move 250 people.

Usage factors must be carefully considered also; the percentage of empty seats makes an enormous difference in passenger-miles per unit of energy or pound of CO2. (While the vehicle occupancy of automobiles cannot (yet!) be less than one, trains and airplanes often travel with relatively few passengers – and sometimes with none at all.) How much more usage-efficient is existing Amtrak service along the heavily-used Washington-Boston corridor versus lightly traveled routes in the "hinterlands"? How efficient is the best existing passenger rail in Europe? Japan? Practically speaking, what kind of usage factors could we expect for high-speed service along a Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison-Minneapolis route?

Given our worsening ecological circumstances, our unsustainable consumption of natural resources, and the prospects for a long and severe recession, America desperately needs facts rather than urban myths and "green-washing"; we need reality-based planning rather than cheerleading and poorly conceived, hastily-approved public works projects. We must thoroughly analyze the efficiencies of our existing transportation modes, soberly review existing and practically-achievable alternatives, and then responsibly choose those transportation arrangements our heirs can afford in the future. This is not the time to shoot from the hip, "wish upon a star", or print our money into hyperinflation!

And throughout it all we must never forget this elemental fact: proximity is the most efficient form of "transportation" that will ever exist. There is nothing like already being within a short stroll, a flight of stairs, or a quick bicycle ride from where we want to be. Our greatest challenge is to stop manufacturing so many "needs" for more complex, ecologically-disruptive forms of transportation in the first place!

On the Spot

2008-10-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, it’s important that “regular folks” like Ingrid Jackson of Tennessee put Presidential candidates on the spot (debate #2). Would they boost green jobs? Would they avert climate change in time?

But putting THEM on the spot is nowhere near enough. No President will fund eco-friendly employment if 51% of voters refuse to foot the bill. No President will aggressively fight global warming if 51% of us aren’t willing to cut our own emissions without being compelled by government decree. No candidate has forgotten President Carter’s crushing defeat after he warned us to tighten our belts and live within our means – economic and ecological.

Tragically, we-the-people are still far more concerned about holding our leaders to account than demanding accountability from ourselves. Just look at the incredible discrepancy between media treatment of politicians and corporate executives versus the man on the street. Back when "pain at the pump" was headline news, did any reporter ask an ordinary citizen, "Excuse me, sir, but did America invade and occupy the Mideast for your oil?" Have you ever asked that question yourself? Great lies and greater evils flourish when such candor is taboo.

You and I need to stop waiting for Washington! Let’s create green jobs for ourselves and our neighbors – and pay for them ourselves. Let’s start a transportation revolution – beginning with 100% renewable self-locomotion via our own legs. Let’s decide how we’ll slash our CO2 emissions to safe levels by 2020 – and get down to it. And let’s stop wars for energy which are being waged on our behalf against humanity and nature – petroleum from the strife-torn Mideast, oil sands from Canada's vast forests, and coal from beneath the pristine mountaintops of Appalachia.

Because if we don’t make this stuff happen from the grassroots up, it ain't gonna happen at all.

New World Order

2008-09-19T10:25:00.001-07:00

From the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times:

Community planners, municipal officials, and business owners tend to get fixated on the notion that "If we build it they will come/behave/do/act…". Meanwhile, many New Urban/anti-sprawl advocates focus on "If we stop it they won't come/behave/do…"

Stated another way, they (and we) often subscribe to a mechanistic view of (those other) human beings as mere automatons responding to environment (in this case infrastructure). But as most of us know intuitively, there can be safety in numbers – i.e. when more people choose a particular activity/behavior, not only does it become more acceptable socially, but it can actually make the activity/behavior safer for participants regardless of infrastructure. This recent study demonstrates it applies to bicycling:

http://www.livescience.com/health/080905-bike-accidents.html

Does this mean infrastructure doesn't matter? Can we afford to forget about bicycle lanes and paths, sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, or the "Elephant in the Drop Off Zone"? Should we stop giving our elected officials and public servants (ahem) extra-real-hard spankings when they forget about "habitat for humanity" and choose instead to make the world as convenient as possible for the resource-gobbling species homo automobilicus?

Absolutely not! What it does mean is that we should encourage our fellow citizens to stop waiting for infrastructure, stop making excuses, and git their dang butts on the saddle. We got a New World Order to make – one we-the-people will CREATE by showing up with two wheels…and two feet.

(This letter was also sent to state and county highway departments as well as a number of Madison-area municipal officials, planners, and environmental leaders.)

Technology & Self-Restraint

2008-07-29T07:44:00.000-07:00

James Howard Kustler frequently emphasizes the crucial point that technology is not a replacement for energy. This is no less true for ethics.

"Technology is not a substitute for enlightened self-restraint. To the contrary, the more powerful and complex the technologies that we-the-people choose to adopt, the greater the caution and the more refined the precision we must exercise in the deployment, lest through inadvertence or lack of foresight those technologies undermine or destroy the foundational ecosystems that sustain human life." - Hans Noeldner, 29 Jul 2008

Man with 11,000 watts of technology at his disposal 24/7/365 can do far more damage to his fellow human beings - and his home planet - than Man with 300. (Incidentally, the average automobile produces significantly more than 11,000 watts at highway speeds...)

No Race for Small Footprints

2008-07-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

Burning through aviation fuel just as fast as money. Multiple flights per candidate per day. High-speed armored convoys at every stop. And always with a phalanx of fossil-fueled media in their wake.

It’s not just that prospects with small Footprints need not apply for the job. No, it’s also the virtual certainty that our frenzied election process will quickly cull anyone – candidate or newsperson – who has any VISCERAL comprehension of how small we-the-people must make our Ecological Footprints to save Earth. Walking gently and living carbon-lite are totally alien to their way of life. If those who are swept up in this hyper-metabolic machine “got it”, they’d either go mad or have to quit out of conscience.

We are damned fools to expect either Obama or McCain to lead us to the Sustainable Promised Land – or for the mainstream media to reveal where it is on the map. They’ve long since flown far beyond it, and they aren’t looking back.

Elephant in the Drop-Off Zone

2008-06-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

June 30th – first day of Summer School

This morning, as I walked towards Prairie View Elementary School to escort a child to my wife’s in-home day-care on West Lincoln Street, I witnessed two motorists nearly run down children who were trying to cross the street. I am sick with fear. And I am filled with anger at my community. Because the problem isn’t just these two distracted motorists. It’s how so many of us have chosen to live.

No doubt the summer school curricula will include many lessons on conserving resources and preserving ecosystems and coexisting peacefully on Earth. But what will our children learn about fighting global warming when they are strapped all by themselves into the back seat of a fossil-fueled motor vehicle? What will they learn about overcoming America’s addiction to oil with Mom’s foot on the accelerator pedal? And what will they learn about coexisting with 6.5 billion other human beings when their parents can’t even manage to live in peace with children who walk and ride their bicycles to summer school?

It’s not just that so many of us still deny the connection between our own hand on the gas pump and the blood and treasure that America is forfeiting to occupy the Mideast – we can always blame President Bush instead of ourselves and our neighbors.

It’s not just that we remain blind to the carbon dioxide that pours from our tail pipes – coal-fired electricity is a bigger problem and we can always hang the crime of thermal genocide on evil utility executives.

It’s not just that we are passing more bucks than ever to OPEC and oil lobbyists in Washington – Fed Chair Bernanke is the fall guy de jour for inflating the dollar into worthlessness and driving our nation into bankruptcy.

But there is absolutely no excuse for us to pass the buck when our own schoolchildren are being endangered by…US! Citizens of Oregon*, how can we not see the elephant in the room? Because when we get into our vehicles and drive to congested places like an elementary school entrance, that’s exactly what we become – elephants! Even if we drive a Prius or Vibe instead of an Expedition or Avalanche, our automotive exoskeleton is a veritable pachyderm compared to a child who is trying to cross the street.

It’s time to face some inconvenient truths. The way to stop global warming is to stop driving our children everywhere – including summer school. The way to stop wars for oil is to stop buying so damn much of the stuff – even if that means actually LIVING where we live rather than driving somewhere else all the time. And the key to coexistence lies in choosing to be small and slow and gentle rather than big and fast and powerful.

P.S. If this feels like an attack on you, dear reader, consider how our precious children feel when we fail to see them beyond the anonymity of our tinted glass and beneath our supersized hoods.

* Oregon, Wisconsin, that is

Election Spin 2008

2008-06-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

Now that the final stretch of Election 2008 is underway, Republican spin on energy issues is becoming obvious.

(1) High gasoline prices? It's the fault of environmentalists (i.e. DEMOCRATS.) These guys – and their bosom buddies the trial attorneys and activist judges – have managed for far too long to block exploration and extraction of vast reserves right here in America.

(2) But Mr. McCain, didn’t you say you were opposed to more offshore drilling only a few months ago? $4 gas changes everything, just like 9/11 changed everything. (Remind the people of 9/11 whenever possible.) Next question?

(3) And didn’t President Bush help his brother Florida Governor Jeb Bush to block offshore drilling in Florida? Next question!! (And make sure that damned reporter gets blacklisted – I don’t want any more questions from him!)

(4) How much oil is really available in areas that are currently off-limits, and how soon can oil corporations get it to the (American) consumer? American companies must be allowed to produce more American oil – end of discussion. There shall be no mention of realistic estimates of recoverable reserves, the mind-boggling number of holes already poked into this highly-perforated continent, nor of the brine-laden dribble from US wells which currently average tens or sometimes hundreds of barrels per day rather than the thousands and tens-of-thousands which obtained in the prior century.

(5) What about long lead-times for new infrastructure? What about looming shortages of highly trained, experienced personnel as the aging petroleum workforce retires? Details, details! Again, acknowledging these factors will only detract the public’s 15-second attention span from the Main Point: Everything is the fault of Democrats.

(6) What about leaving some oil in the ground for future generations? Acknowledging that our heirs might have more important things to do with oil than burn it in speedboats, riding lawn mowers, and flights to Vail to play on the powdery slopes shall be Grounds for immediate decapitation. Technology and The Market – not frugality and enlightened restraint – are The Answer. Oh, and by the way, Democrats are the blackguards who always block The Market from optimizing Technology.

(7) What about fairness? Is it RIGHT for five percent of Earth's population to burn more than 30% of the world's motor fuel? Implement Evasion Tactic #1: Government must not interfere with Free Enterprise. It is axiomatic that consumers have a right to purchase whatever they want with their hard-earned dollars – and if that happens to be oil, fine and good. Also Spake Die Markt.

(8) But hold on a minute - do Americans really need to consume so much oil? Isn’t quite a bit of our usage discretionary? Whoaaaa! Stop right there – this is Economic heresy! We NEVER NEVER NEVER distinguish between needs and wants. Economy must grow; therefore Everything consumers (can be convinced to) want is a need.

(9) What about refineries? Obviously more and bigger are better. Once again, the eco-warriors (i.e. Democrats) and their accomplices at the bar and on the bench are to blame for blocking production of domestic oil resources. (Fortunately for the Republican Party, the chances are slim that oil companies really want to invest in significant expansions of their US refining capacity – “It's the lack of supplies, stupid!” So Republicans can make hay on the issue, pin blame on Democrats, but not risk offending any Republican voters who, in the final analysis, would revolt at the prospect of a refinery spoiling their view from their McMansion on the 18th hole.)

(10) What about Clean Coal? Unloose the fetters on Free Enterprise! Let The Market work its magic! (To the extent that the term "Clean Coal" is defined at all, it will be portrayed as a fait accompli rather than a dubious research-stage technology which might never prove practical. Naturally no mention shall be made of the fact that the Federal government recently pulled the plug on FutureGen, Clean Coal’s flagship research project.)

(11) Are the environmental costs of coal mining acceptable? Don’t EVER bring it up!! And if someone else does, tar and feather those unpatriotic left-leaning bastards (i.e. Democrats) who always sabotage good-paying American jobs and block the use of our own domestic energy. (Fortunately, the most devastating coal mining in America happens to occur in historically Democratic territory, so the Democratic Party probably won’t make it an issue of it either. Hey!! What could be better?)

(12) What about Coal-to-Liquids? Go for it! Subsidize it! Provide big tax loopholes – oops, I mean incentives – for it! Next question?

(13) What about Tar Sands? Go for it BIG TIME!! (Tar Sands are especially good because this province-spanning disaster isn't happening in the backyards of any US voters.)

(14) What about Nuclear? YES! YES! YES!

(15) But what about disposal of nuclear waste? Don’t bring it up until we’ve got a political “solution”. (OK, Karl, you're our best spinner ever, now get to work on it pronto! Hmmm…what if the most geologically stable sequestration site turned out to be in a lightly populated state that just happens to be a Democratic stronghold? SWEET!)

Last but not least:

(16) What if oil prices go down? We got a winner!

a. "Thank God Dubya unsheathed Amerka's mightily sword after 9/11! Otherwise Unser Fuehrer wouldn't be able to twist OPECs greasy arms and make 'em open the spigots."

(17) What if prices really go over the top? What if there are actual shortages? What if rationing proves necessary? EVEN BETTER! Now would-be-emperor George becomes Moses. Not only can all these troubles be blamed on Democrats (see above), but the bumbled invasion of Iraq suddenly becomes a prophetic act of deliverance:

a. "Gosh, here it turns out that Iraq has MORE oil than the Saudis…Thank God Dubya gave Saddam the boot! I mean, just think what would happen if Saddam still controled of all that oil…"

b. "Thank God Dubya has (most of) our sojers and sailors defending (our) Freedom (to consume all the oil we want) right there where (most of) the (world’s remaining) oil is!” (After the people have endured shortages and/or rationing for a few days, politicians of all stripes will tacitly acknowledge that “their” oil is now ours; by then everyone will clearly understand that if The Flow is not quickly restored, our Non-Negotiable Way of Life will collapse.)

c. “Thank God Dubya is opening-up Iraq to Free Enterprise! Now our multinational oil corporations can show the world what real production efficiency looks like – and THAT will bring oil prices back down to Earth again!"

d. "Thank God Dubya is constructing that huge military complex – oops I mean embassy – in Bagdad. Now let's see if Iraqi resistance fighters – oops I mean terrorists – can stop the Free Market from delivering oil to the consumer (i.e. US)!"

e. Oh, and now that rationing is necessary, Homeland Security needs to issue and track National Identity Cards. And maybe Dubya should clamp down a bit more on civil liberties, freedom of association, freedom of the press…

Will the Democratic Party act like the proverbial deer in the headlights if/when Energy comes to dominate the campaign? Unfortunately, refuting the Supply-Side Fairytale in the realm of political “reality” requires that a voting majority must have the rudimentary ability to grasp basic scientific and geological facts. Nor does it help that the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the looming exhaustion of low-entropy, environmentally-benign energy "sources" virtually ensure that our Happy Motoring Days will sputter to a halt rather soon.

The troubles that lie ahead call for much more than “change”. They demand a truly courageous, sweeping new vision of a sustainable civilization – along with equitably-shared sacrifices, hard work, and a pervasive dedication to the common good we-the-people have not evinced since WWII. Unfortunately real citizenship doesn't "sell" anymore. Or that's what we – and our "leaders" – keep telling ourselves.

Habitat Follows Behavior

2008-05-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

The possibility that we can create a thriving, truly sustainable civilization on Earth will arise from our willingness to choose "unreasonable" responsibility. So, dear reader, I challenge you to choose to live your life as though the scale and form of your built environment is a direct result of your scale and form – and my own - as we occupy and move through it:

http://americancity.org/magazine/article/respect-for-the-human-scale/

Another way to state this is: "Habitat Follows Behavior". Now this definitely flies in the face of conventional wisdom! In fact "starchitects" would have us believe that humanity is a product of the physical built environment (and, therefore, Man can be perfected by Architect!) Surely this god-like delusion puts the cart before the horse; the evidence is overwhelming that built environments reflect the nature and values of the specie which inhabits them.

Introduce a gluttonous, power-obsessed, hyper-individualistic species and you will get Wretched Habitat regardless of the good intentions of the architects and planners who serve them. Introduce a humble, frugal, community-oriented species and ironically – even though their built environment will not be a top priority for the inhabitants – great (if modest) architecture will arise organically and mainly as a consequence of pragmatism.

What does our scale and form while in motion have to do with it? Earth is finite and the laws of thermodynamics are well-established – albeit very poorly understood by most citizens. Given a planetary population of 6.6 billion people and counting, and given that per-capita rates of consumption, emissions, and environmental degradation are growing even faster, it is abundantly clear that our current arrangements in Amerka – especially those related to transportation – are energetically and ecologically unsustainable. Given our supersized waistlines and debilitating levels of social isolation, it is clear that our current transportation arrangements are not good for us.

If we accept the imperative of good stewardship, our plans to create a sustainable civilization must be founded on conservative, realistic assumptions rather than on speculations, wishful thinking, and the tremendous inertia of "business as usual". This inevitably means we denizens of the First World – and our descendants – must live far smaller in terms of the physical environment. Closer to home, the central question is this: will you and I choose transportation behaviors which restore human-scale arrangements in our own community? Or will we continue to "be" automobiles every time we go somewhere? The former demands that we relinquish our seemingly-limitless sense of entitlements to material comforts and luxuries.

Speaking of wishful thinking, we must not expect or wait for our government to lead us to sustainable behaviors. Note well, my friends, that ever since we-the-people kicked Jimmy Carter from the Oval Office for having urged us to put on our sweaters, both of our political parties have been all too eager to indulge the consumerist/entitlement mentality that is now bankrupting Amerka. Transformation is not a job for people who sit in the bleachers and observe and pass judgment. It is a job for players.

Citizen HanZiBoi

The Surge

2008-05-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

18 May 2008 Madison, Wisconsin – Delphic Newswire

The US Commerce Department reported today that production of lame excuses surged to an all-time high in April as millions of Americans manufactured billions of reasons to do absolutely nothing themselves to avert global warming, stop wars for oil, or prevent sprawl, obesity, isolation, and physical atrophia. Surprisingly, even places like Wisconsin’s Dane County – known for its self-righteous proclamations of progressive leadership – rank well above average in per-capita output of pathetic evasions.

“Soccer mom” Sue Viego from the Ravenoaks country estate subdivision ten miles south of Madison offered a typical justification. “Hey, get off my case! My little Justin needs to play soccer just like all the other normal kids. I need to drive him to practice and games, and it takes a big vehicle like my Ford Excursion to keep him safe from all the idiot drivers out there.”

Gwen Emitmoore of Verona noted that she bought a “whole bunch” of compact fluorescent light bulbs when they were on sale more than a year ago, but hasn’t had the time to install them yet. “It’s dark and depressing with the curtains and shades drawn; I like to leave the lights and TV on to cheer me up. Anyway, why should I be forced to conserve? There are plenty of people who use more than me!”

Joe Sechsgepaecken from the Town of Burke on Madison's north side was surprised to hear that his family wasn’t making progress. “Mildred wanted a new fridge, so we got one of them energy efficient models. Naturally I moved the old fridge to the shop – I keep beer in it now. What do you mean our electric went UP? Ain’t I done everything I’m supposed to?”

William Heifen-Aetname from Monroe Street in Madison represents one of the few people who are choosing to act. “I put a big ‘No War/No Warming’ bumper sticker on my Subaru, right next the “Coexist” sticker, and I’m driving all over to make sure people see it. I park at the front door everywhere I go – then everybody has to walk by and read it when they come in from the parking lot.”

Mow Is Less

2008-04-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

It began sensibly enough. The courthouse square and the schoolyard. The space in front of the house, around the garden, a path to the privy. The younger children would cut some lawn every week or so with the reel mower. Pa and the older boys would scythe the tall grasses in the orchard and surrounding the outbuildings to gather for hay a few times each season. Grazing animals performed much of the “lawn” maintenance too. A century ago, people mowed modestly -- enough for picnics and band concerts and the children to play croquet.

How times have changed! Today we-the-people of the United States mow 30 to 40 million acres of grass, an area almost as large as the state of Wisconsin, about half the acreage our nation devotes to corn. Although urban lawns tend to be very small, suburbanites tend to mow a third-of-an-acre or more, and many exurbanites, non-urban businesses, and retired farmers mow five to ten acres of lawn.

Each year we apply millions of tons of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and billions of gallons of fossil-fuel-pumped water to make our lawns grow luxuriantly – and then burn billions of gallons of petroleum to pare back the over-stimulated turf! Tragically, many of us use more water and non-renewable fuels to maintain our lawns than most other humans on Earth use to grow food for themselves.

Do our lawns serve a basic human need? Is our enormous allocation of resources to turf justified because lawns provide essential food, clothing, shelter, or protections from dangers or disease? Are 30 to 40 million acres of mowed grass a practical necessity for civilization?

NO! Rigorously-shorn lawns became fashionable a mere century ago, and their tremendous expansion in the last fifty years was made possible by skyrocketing land, fuel, and water consumption. Modest areas of mowed grass for play areas and around gardens and buildings are indeed practical, but we have far exceeded this. Most of our current lawn acreage experiences human traffic only when we (or our lackeys) are doing maintenance.

So what is the present-day mowed, fertilized, pesticized, and irrigated American Lawn? A host for diverse native grasses and forbs? A sanctuary for birds and other wildlife? An efficient watershed that absorbs, filters, and slowly releases rainwater? A source of livestock feed? An opportunity for healthy exercise? A soil-building carbon dioxide “sink” that helps to fight the greenhouse effect?

NO! Most contemporary lawns comprise a chemically addicted monoculture, so very few plant or animal species live there. Birds cannot nest in frequently cut turf. Short grass and compacted lawn soil absorb significantly less rainfall than woodlands or native meadow vegetation. Lawns furnish almost no livestock feed today. Few kids or adults benefit from aerobic lawn-mower-pushing every week; we perch our ever-fatter bottoms on noisy, gas-guzzling riding mowers instead. Given the amount of fossil fuels we use to mow, fertilize, water, and chemically treat our lawns, we actually exacerbate global warming.

Mow has become less. Less wildlife and plant life. Less clean air and water. Less peace and quiet. Less physical fitness and environmental health. Less financial and energy security. Lawn mowing even plunges our nation deeper into debt, since we now import two-thirds of our petroleum. To keep our mowers fueled and this vast acreage faithfully shorn in the decades to come, will we continue to send forth our soldiers to serve as World Oil Policemen?

When it comes to lawns, we-the-people show no more wisdom or foresight than the sheep and cattle which once cropped the grass. It’s time to wise up, one yard at a time -- starting with our own!

Links and references

http://ohioline.osu.edu/sc177/sc177_14.html

http://www.nwf.org/backyardwildlifehabitat/problems.cfm

Green Car Checklist

2008-04-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Development efforts at “green” car design studios like Aptera Motors
( http://www.apteramotors.com ) look very promising - especially in the all-important virtual-reality/venture-capital-raising realm. But take care! Wildly optimistic public expectations for "green" cars are severely impeding humanity's faltering steps towards creating a sustainable society. The species homo automobilicus would much rather wait for technological silver bullets than adopt lifestyle changes - especially as regards unlimited personal motorized mobility.

But transportation systems based on moving human beings one-at-a-time or two-at-a-time in sixteen foot, two-ton metal boxes is itself fatally flawed. Even 100% “green” cars live on 100% DEAD pavement – and we are rapidly suffocating Earth beneath highways, streets, and parking lots. The sooner we-the-people get over our obsessive-destructive love affair with the automobile, the better.

That said, should mankind manage to continue the project of civilization, greatly reduced levels of driving in far more modest and efficient vehicles will play a important transportation role. The issue is not whether we will continue to use cars, it is whether we will choose the degree of enlightened self-restraint that is essential for a sustainable balance. Regrettably, new tech automophilia seduces many into believing that behavioral restraints are unnecessary.

Everything becomes clear when promising vehicular advances are evaluated using the following "Green Car Checklist". Here is the scoring for “Aptera” – but note that the composite results differ little from scores for the “Prius” and “VW TDI New Beetle”.

YES - reduces direct CO2 emissions from vehicle
YES - reduces dependence on fossil fuels
YES - reduces material usage in vehicle
YES - less intimidating to non-motorists
??? - fewer deaths and injuries to non-motorists in accidents
(probably not if driven at >30 MPH)

NO - reduces obesity by increasing physical activity
NO - fosters infill and compact development
NO - fosters walking and bicycling
NO - fosters use of public transportation
NO - reduces demand for Earth-suffocating roadways
(unless lanes could be made much narrower)

NO - reduces demand for Earth-suffocating parking
(unless TWO or more will fit in ONE conventional parking stall)

NO - reduces destruction of watersheds and aquifers
NO - reduces displacement of wildlife habitat
NO - reduces loss of farmlands
NO - increases civic interconnections via shared public spaces
NO - fosters local interdependence

Winner? Looser?

RESULTS:
(1) Very promising engineering step
(2) Wrong focus for the automobile-addicted public

Global Warming "Religion"?

2008-03-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

The following is a letter-to-the-editor which I submitted to the Wisconsin State Journal and (Madison WI) Capital Times on 22 March 2008.

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Many skeptics have begun to assert that Global Warming has become a “religion” of sorts, and several made this charge at the March 19th public listening session held by the Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming. Such allegations contain more than a kernel of truth: zealousness, righteousness, and stern reproaches of “disbelievers” are prevalent among Climate Change activists.

Yet it is clear many skeptics are motivated no less by their faith in the Church of Perpetual Economic Growth. Nor can anyone deny which “religion” reigns supreme in these United States: the doctrine of producing and consuming, of developing and expanding, of discarding and emitting more and more, forever and ever, Amen. Our economic high priests proclaim that the “Law of Substitution” will overcome all material and energetic limits. They praise the infinite wisdom of the “Invisible Hand”. And they demand that “The Market” be unshackled and set free at last – then irksome non-monetary considerations like foresight, ethical governance, and enlightened self-restraint can be cast aside.

God Himself may not know whether in this century mankind will render Earth a thermodynamically-inhospitable habitat for humanity. But only complete fools would ignore the fact that our species is reaching and exceeding many of our planet’s limits: the devastating overharvesting of ocean fish, the combustion of a cubic mile of non-renewable petroleum per year, and vast soil erosion due to unsustainable agriculture. If we do not ration our exploitation of Earth, Nature will ration us.

Edmund Burke’s warning summarizes it best: “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

Kunstler's Nightmare

2008-03-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

I’m sorry, Mr. James Howard Kunstler, you’re gonna hate me for saying this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the “warehouse in wheels” you despise so vehemently will work equally well in reverse. That’s right, your old nemesis Wal-Mart may soon be squirting out chintzy plastic salad-shooters in Sheboygan and shipping ‘em straight to Shanghai.

“Whaaa?” you ask. “Howz that possible?” Easy! All they gotta do is convert their US stores into sweatshops and their Chinese factories into Supercenters. After the nose-diving dollar topples debt-laden Amerkan consumers from the apex of the world’s economic pyramid; after the Second Great Depression crushes every vestigial sense of entitlement from us; it will be a proverbial cakewalk to “retool” former shopaholics, NASCAR worshippers, and hedge fund boiz into planet Earth’s low-wage grunts. Like you say, “It’s all good!”

But with oil topping $108 per barrel…and then $200…and eventually $400…a “warehouse” on eighteen-wheelers won’t be affordable, not even for Wal-Mart. No prob-LAY-mo, Jimbo! They’ll just follow your advice and float their warehouses on the water. Move their cargo on ships which sip that expensive oil a drop at a time. From Sheboygan and Chicago through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence to the sea. From Saratoga Springs down the Hudson, from Dayton down the Ohio, and from Minneapolis down the Mississippi. Out of Puget Sound, out of the mouth of the Chesapeake, and out of San Francisco Bay. And then half-way ‘round the globe, to the Twenty-First Century nexus of economic power and consumption. Using a pittance of fuel per ton of freight.

Yes, there will be mighty rivers of Amerkan-made stuff flowing the other direction this time – back to China, back to Thailand, back to India. Using the same old containers piled high on the same old ships. But not just extraneous kitchen gadgets and whole phyla of stuffed toys – they’ll be hauling away nearly every kernel of wheat and corn, nearly every ingot of steel and coil of rebar, and – too bad for all you carnivores out there – most of “our” beef. No matter which direction it moves, Wal-Mart will make oceans of money. But don’t get your hopes up that more than a few drops will “trickle down” from Bentonville Arkansas to the rest of the USA!

Who knows? With indentured-servant Billy Fourwheeler pedaling his bicycle to the salad-shooter plant in the old Wal-Mart store; with Sue Viego’s Expedition up on cinderblocks and “recycled” into the family chicken coop; with soccer centers transformed into Victory gardens and ballet schools shuttered and Amerkan kids engaged in fossil-fuel-free, free-range play right out the kitchen door; maybe – just maybe – Earth’s hardworking farmers will manage to produce enough rapeseed oil to run the whole damn thing for a while.